Superintendent Cami Anderson needs support to make change in Newark schools

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Cami Anderson, the new superintendent in Newark, is a veteran of the school wars in New York City, so maybe she was prepared for what hit her the other night during a community forum at the Louise A. Spencer School.

She was called a liar. She was called a coward. Her reform plan was condemned as an insult to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And then it got worse.

The low point came when a union leader, Joe DelGrosso, compared the state control of city schools to slavery: “You robbed them of their ancestry once,” shouted DelGrosso, who is white. “Why not again?”

But even that’s not the really sad part of this story. This is Newark, after all, and public meetings here often get rowdy, thanks to a small group of activists who would be right at home on “The Jerry Springer Show.”

The really sad part is that most of the elected school committee did not lift a finger in her defense. It was as if Anderson was supposed to move the reform all by herself.

“What concerns me is there’s no chorus of people emerging in her support,” says Mayor Cory Booker. “This is the first time in decades we’ve had a superintendent who is willing to do unpopular things that put children first. I give her an A-plus for courage.”

Anderson is the sort of woman who seems ready to bang her head through a brick wall to get this done. One of 12 children in a mixed-race family, a senior aide to Joel Klein when he revamped New York City’s schools, she is a white woman who lives in Newark with her African-American husband and their young son. This is not someone who is going to be intimidated by the race card.

The reform plan itself is smart and tough. Anderson wants to close seven schools, maybe eight, chosen because students are failing and because some of the buildings are nearly half empty.

That will save a ton of money, because it costs up to $1 million a year to maintain each school. The saved funds will go to the new schools, likely for technology upgrades.

But the more important change concerns personnel. One of Newark’s key problems is its number of ineffective teachers who have tenure. To remove them, Anderson had to get creative. So she has granted principals the right to reject teacher placements in their schools.

For the principals, that is a godsend.

“If I can change my staff, I guarantee that, within a year, we will see student growth,” says Chaletta Barnes, principal of Dayton Street School, one of those slated to close. “It hurts me to know we are a failing school. And I am all about change and making things better.”

There is a catch, an expensive one. Anderson can’t lay off the teachers no one wants. She already has 85 teachers in an “excess teacher pool” that costs the district about $8 million a year, and that number will soon grow.

She has other reforms in mind, such as expanding charter schools, as long as they take their fair share of low performers. But it’s the closings and the new rules on teacher placement that are raising hackles among parents and union leaders.

She seems to be making progress with them, as well. At a meeting of parents and teachers at Dayton Street on Thursday night, there was no shouting and no insults. Teachers asked how they can apply for jobs in the new schools. Parents asked when they would learn their children’s new school assignments.

It’s the hesitation of civil leaders that seems to concern her: “People are taking a wait-and-see attitude,” she says. “And we need more people to jump in the water and say it’s time for bold action.”

Maybe it’s coming. At the raucous meeting at Louise A. Spencer, Bob Curvin, one of the city’s most respected elders, begged the crowd for civility. “The schools in Newark have been very bad off for a very long time,” he said later. “Poor Cami is carrying everyone’s baggage.”

And Shavar Jeffries, the school committee member who set a record for most votes in his election, offered a vigorous defense of Anderson’s “courage” and added that King would “roll in his grave” to hear his name invoked in defense of a failing school.

In the end, Anderson can do what she wants, given the state control. But she wants more of the full-throated support she got from Jeffries at that meeting.

Because she knows that for the reform to work, and to last beyond the next political cycle, she needs to win hearts and minds in this town. And that she cannot do alone.